Oculus Unveils 1080p HD Prototype Oculus Rift System at E3

The team behind the exciting Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is hard at work and demoed a prototype 1080p HD version of its flagship product at E3 this week. “Raising the resolution for the consumer Rift has always been one of the highest priorities,” wrote the team in a blog post. They say that the higher-res version will double the number of visible pixels and generally enhance the immersion factor of the image.

The image’s brightness, contrast, and color will also enjoy a notable improvement. Although this prototype may not be what we see in the final, consumer-ready version of the Oculus Rift, developers can continue to create for the headset without worry, as the team says that the Oculus SDK will “automatically handle the resolution and distortion changes for the consumer version”.

That’s not all that Oculus had to share, though; the company has been working with Epic games to integrate Unreal Engine 4, and now UE4 supports the Oculus Rift out of the box.

Another new addition is 3D virtual reality movies courtesy of the VR Cinema3D app. Currrently the app is just a demo (with a few bugs), but it’s in active development. The Oculus team noted that now that there’s an HD version of the Rift, it can take advantage of movie-watching much more effectively than before.

One final note: We imagine that the Oculus Rift team is working with heavy hearts at E3 after the sudden loss of one of Oculus Rift’s co-founders, Andrew Reisse, just a couple of weeks ago. According to a nice memorial writeup of Reisse, the Oculus team stated that his impact on the products and technologies discussed today and built during Oculus’ existence was “immeasurable”. Thus, a tip of the hat to Reisse and his good work, on display this week, is in order.